Gay advocates mock Rick Warren’s ‘urgent’ donation pleas

WASHINGTON — Evangelical pastor Rick Warren’s “urgent” plea for donations to sustain his megachurch has been met with amusement and mockery from gay rights advocates.

Warren posted a letter online Wednesday saying his Saddleback Church is “$900,000 in the red for the year” and pleaded with congregants to help fill the gap “in the next 48 hours,” the Associated Press reported.

Warren said the recession hurt funding all year, but tallied up his eleventh hour effort to the Church’s lower-than-expected donations on Christmas. “This last weekend the bottom dropped out,” he said in the letter.

The gay community, which has long been at odds with Warren’s opposition to same-sex marriage, doesn’t appear sad about the news.

A headline at the popular gay website Queerty read, “Rick Warren’s Budget for Hypocrisy Is $900,000 Short This Year.”

The article dubbed Warren an “anti-gay pastor” whose church has “gone broke and begging for cash.” It said that Warren “won’t share explicit financial details of the church, so it’s hard to tell whether $900k is a pittance to Saddleback, or represents a gaping hole in their books.”

While not dismissing the notion that the Church might genuinely be in need of funds, Queerty speculated that maybe “Warren is just being greedy, and begging supporters to give him their last few pennies before the clock strikes midnight.”